Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

As far back as the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding black people from jury service was unconstitutional, but juries remained all-white for decades afterward. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case. In Deep South states, jury rolls were pulled from voting rolls, which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act passed, court clerks and judges still kept the jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed to undermine the law. Local jury commissions used statutory requirements that jurors be “intelligent and upright” to exclude African Americans and women. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional, which in some communities at least led to black people being summoned to the courthouse for possible selection as jurors (if not selected). The Court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries—it only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender. For many African Americans, the use of wholly discretionary peremptory strikes to select a jury of twelve remained a serious barrier to serving on a jury.